Dark Tide (8 page)

While the overwhelming majority of Italian immigrants were apolitical, the radical anarchists and their followers frightened Americans and made them even more suspicious of the entire ethnic group.

The discrimination Italian immigrants faced in America fueled their disdain for politics, their suspicion and distrust of government, and their aversion to civic activism. This, coupled with their very high illiteracy rates and inability to speak English, had a profoundly negative effect on the assimilation of southern Italians into American life. Most importantly, these factors discouraged Italians from swearing allegiance to their new country by acquiring citizenship, a necessity if they ever were to vote and wield political power. By 1910, only about 25 percent of Italians in Boston had been naturalized.

“The Italians without doubt take the least interest in politics of any nationality,” historian Frederick A. Bushee wrote in 1903. “They are at the foot of the list by every mode of calculation. Migration of single men (back to Italy) helps to break up organized political work among the Italians, but the chief reason is that Italians themselves have developed little interest in politics.” Immigrant leader Gino Speranza wrote in 1904: “As a nationality, Italians have not forced political recognition. Though numerically strong, there is no such ‘Italian vote’ as to interest politicians. They have no representative press outside of their neighborhoods and well-organized movements among them for their own good are rare.” Little had changed in Italian enclaves by 1915.

Italians continued to marry, have children, buy property, start businesses, and create bustling commercial and residential communities, including the North End. But because most were not citizens and could not vote, they had little recourse when external forces reached into their neighborhoods and threatened their quality of life. And because of the persistent bigotry that labeled southern Italians as an inferior people, few allies were willing to stand and fight with them.

All of this was good news for U.S. Industrial Alcohol.

The plight of North End Italians emboldened USIA to construct its mammoth molasses tank in Boston’s most congested neighborhood. The company
expected
and received virtually no opposition—the poor, vilified, mostly illiterate, and politically toothless Italian immigrants who lived and worked in the shadow of the tank day and night had neither the inclination nor the political power to offer organized resistance.

A few Boston-Irish city workers who labored adjacent to the tank
did
comment on its size during construction, but offered no real protest. They left the North End at night, and their homes and families were far removed from any danger. These men worked on the waterfront, but work and home were two decidedly different places. Boston city workers were grateful for both their jobs and the fact that the molasses tank did not stand in the middle of
their
neighborhood.

So it was understandable that when the tank started to leak shortly after its completion—save for the warnings of Isaac Gonzales—the North End once again remained silent.

By 1916, the munitions companies were on a roll and, by extension, so were the companies that supplied them. Big Munitions and Big Steel, the sinews of war, had rescued America from the widespread business recessions that shook the country during the first two years of the Wilson Administration. When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, the outlook for economic recovery in America was gloomy. Factories were working at 60 percent capacity, estimates of the unemployed reached close to a million, and hundreds of thousands of unemployed were near starvation level.

Hard times continued into 1915, but the rapid growth of the munitions trade revitalized the U.S. economy. The value of explosives exported from the United States increased from $2.8 million in March of 1915 to $33 million in November. But 1916 was truly a watershed year for the war industries and the companies that supplied them. In August of that year, the value of explosives exported from the United States reached $75 million, compared with only $14 million the previous August. Some estimates put the total value of munitions exports—explosives, firearms, ammunition, and related equipment—at an astounding $1.3 billion for the calendar year 1916.

U.S. Industrial Alcohol rode the coattails of the munitions companies to its own meteoric growth. From 1915 to 1916, its net profit more than doubled; from 1914 to 1916, USIA’s net profit increased nearly
ninefold
. In 1914, USIA stock returned investors just under 2 percent; by 1916, it generated a return of more than 36 percent. Twice in 1916, USIA filled its Commercial Street tank to nearly 2 million gallons, just barely less than capacity, in its efforts to keep up with the industrial alcohol production necessary in the manufacture of high explosives—and this was
before
America entered the war.

Munitions factories began operating three shifts, unemployment was dropping, and financiers like Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan were loaning money for expansion and capital investment. President Wilson firmly believed that the United States should assist the Allied governments to the greatest extent possible within the bounds of American neutrality, a bonus for Big Business, which initially viewed Wilson’s inauguration and liberal policies with apprehension.

“America was already well advanced on the road to war, and she was not to be checked by the weak barriers of neutral obligations,” historian Charles Tansill wrote in 1938.

Nor was her munitions industry to be checked.

Italian immigrants in the North End
had
remained silent when the USIA molasses tank was built, and afterward, once it started to leak. Realistically, though, even if they had the political strength to speak as one, by the middle of 1916, their voices likely would have been drowned out by the roar of the munitions industry juggernaut.

Patrick Kenneally, a boilermaker by trade, sat on a rigging chair suspended twenty feet above the ground, wiping away dark molasses that leaked from the tank’s seams. The chair hung suspended from ropes that were fastened to the top of the tank, and guidelines dropped to the ground to allow Kenneally’s partner to move the rigging apparatus around the tank once he signaled down that he had finished working on one section of the steel wall.

Kenneally worked with a soft rag, a light caulking tool, and a hand hammer. After wiping away the molasses, he would use his tools to flatten the steel on each side of the leaky seam to push it closer together, and then press the steel to seal the leaks.

This was his third day at the Commercial Street tank. They had begun their work on ladders, caulked as high as they could, and then staged the rigging chair to reach the spots that were further up the tank. Kenneally was unaccustomed to working so far above the ground. When he caulked boilers to make them watertight, his work was most often done in a shop. He knew from his decade of experience as a boilermaker that it wasn’t unusual for a newly constructed tank to weep. Although you did what you could to ensure that a new tank was watertight from the beginning, you never really knew whether it would leak until you filled it with water and watched.

What struck him about this tank was that some of the leaks, especially on the harbor side, started high where the walls met the conical-shaped steel cover and seeped molasses all the way to the bottom. They created a series of brackish, fifty-foot streams that meandered to the ground and pooled around the base of the tank.

This didn’t seem right. This tank was doing a lot more than weeping, Patrick Kenneally thought.

It was crying—long, thick tears of brown molasses.

Millard Fillmore Cook, Jr. assumed the unsigned letter was a hoax. He never actually expected to find a bomb.

Since 1912, when he had become supervisor of USIA’s Brooklyn facility, Cook had operated the large plant expertly, supervising molasses shipments into the five tanks on the site and managing a hundred men in the industrial alcohol distillery on the same property. The tanks were nowhere near as large as the company’s new Boston tank; Cook was responsible for two 630,000-gallon tanks, two 180,000-gallon tanks, and one tank that held approximately 140,000 gallons of molasses. Cook also was under pressure to meet production quotas for the plant’s big customers, the du Pont Powder Company and the Hercules Powder Company. USIA considered Cook one of its best plant managers. This supervisor, whose parents had named him after the thirteenth president of the United States, never seemed to get rattled, even when the plant added a third shift to accommodate the demand for industrial alcohol production after war began in Europe in 1914.

Now, though, Millard Fillmore Cook
was
rattled. The package the policeman had given him was about five inches wide and eight inches long, wrapped in thick paper, and carefully tied and knotted with cord. From the end of the package extended a three-inch-long fuse that had, thankfully, malfunctioned and fizzled out before it burned down to the three sticks of dynamite wrapped inside. Police had discovered the bomb under one of the tanks, exactly where the letter had instructed them to look. USIA’s Brooklyn tanks rested on a crib-work of wood, which in turn was supported by concrete columns. This left a gap of about eighteen inches between the tank and the concrete, and it was there that police found the bomb.

USIA had operated the Brooklyn plant since 1902, but Cook knew it had never been as busy as it was now, nor was its work ever as controversial, especially in the minds of the anarchists and radicals who were becoming more daring, not just in Boston, but in New York and around the country. Police had found the bomb under the tank that was closest to Greenpoint Avenue, the main street that led to a bridge connecting the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn with a small settlement across Newtown Creek in Long Island City. Cook knew the Long Island City enclave was thickly populated with foreigners. The warning letter he received was written in broken English. You didn’t need to be a detective to know that the letter most likely had been penned by some radical from the other side of the creek.

The only positive aspect to all of this was that the letter
had
been mailed and the bomb discovered before any damage had been done. Next time, USIA might not be so fortunate. Corporate officials in New York City ordered Cook to question all of his employees and double the guard in Brooklyn to prevent further unauthorized access.

They did not have to tell him twice.

What shocked William White most was the extent of the destruction. A dynamite bomb explosion had ripped a gaping hole clean through the three-foot-thick brick wall of the North End’s Salutation Street Police Station, shattered every window on one side of the building, blew out the window sashes, and split the window casings. White had heard from people on the street that the bomb had been placed in a jail cell in the basement of the station, directly under rooms in which three policemen were sleeping early yesterday morning, a Sunday. They were fortunate to have escaped injury when the direction of the explosion blew outward against the station’s lower wall rather than upward toward the basement ceiling and the first-floor sleeping area. Police officers had told him that inside the station, floors and walls had cracked, furniture had splintered, and ceiling plaster covered everything.

But the damage stretched far beyond the station house. The bomb had smashed every pane of glass in the tenements across Salutation Street—from Commercial Street to Hanover Street—as well as those in several homes on Battery Street, Commercial Street, and North Street. It had exploded just a few short blocks from the molasses tank. White was USIA’s supervisor of the waterfront structure, and he had walked up here today to see for himself what these North End rabble-rousers were capable of, and what additional precautions he needed to take to protect the tank. He was not naïve; he knew the tank was the neighborhood’s most inviting target for antiwar radicals and anarchists operating in the North End who seethed about USIA’s close relationship with the munitions companies.